page_title: Columbia University rape controversy
section_title: Sulkowicz's performance art piece
hierarchical_section_title: Columbia University rape controversy / Sulkowicz's performance art piece
caption_attribution_description: Emma Sulkowicz (centre-right) with Mattress Performance at her graduation, Columbia University, 19 May 2015
context_page_description: In April 2013, Emma Sulkowicz, an American fourth-year visual arts major at Columbia University in New York City, filed a complaint with Columbia University requesting expulsion of fellow fourth-year student and German national, Paul Nungesser, alleging he had raped Sulkowicz in Sulkowicz's dorm room on August 27, 2012. Nungesser was found not responsible by a university inquiry.
  In May 2014, Sulkowicz filed a report against Nungesser with the New York Police Department, who did not pursue charges. The district attorney's office interviewed both students, but did not pursue charges, citing lack of reasonable suspicion. Sulkowicz declined to pursue criminal charges any further, and stated that NYPD officers were dismissive and had mistreated her.
  After Columbia declined to take action against Nungesser, Sulkowicz produced a work of performance art entitled Mattress Performance as a senior thesis, which involved Sulkowicz carrying a 50-pound dorm mattress on campus to represent the painful burden rape victims carry throughout daily life, and in protest of what Sulkowicz described as Columbia University's mishandling of the sexual assault complaint.
context_section_description: Sulkowicz created Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) in the summer of 2014 for their senior thesis while at Yale University Summer School of Art and Music. Their first effort was a video of themself dismantling a bed, accompanied by the audio of them filing the police report, which they had recorded on their cellphone. The mattress later became the sole focus of the piece. Sulkowicz told New York magazine:
  I thought about how ... the mattress represents a private place where a lot of your intimate life happens; and how I have brought my life out in front for the public to see; and the act of bringing something private and intimate out into the public mirrors the way my life has been. Also the mattress as a burden, because of what has happened there, that has turned my own relationship with my bed into something fraught.
  The 50-pound (23 kg), dark-blue, extra-long twin mattress used in the performance art piece is of the kind Columbia places in its dorms, similar to the one on which they allege they were raped. Sulkowicz spent the summer of 2014 creating the rules of engagement: Written on the walls of their studio in the university's Watson Hall, these state that they must carry the mattress whenever they are on university property; that it must remain on campus even when Sulkowicz is not there; and that they are not allowed to ask for help in carrying it, but if help is offered they may accept it. In September that year they began carrying it on campus, which they say is a physically painful experience. Sulkowicz later created another piece of performance art, Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol ("This is not a rape"), a website with an eight minute video of Sulkowicz having sex with an anonymous actor in a dorm room at Columbia University.
caption: Sulkowicz (center right) carrying the mattress at graduation
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